House of Dreams

Stacks of moving boxes are piled up around Pam Works as she sorts through the books of her late husband on this May afternoon. The sticky weather outside hints at summer, but the air is cool in this basement, which is filled with the old and the new, the past and the present, the burden of remembering and the guilt of forgetting.

Since the murder of John Works in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, his 39-year-old wife has saved nearly everything of his, and reassured herself that she would be better able to handle parting with his belongings when she moved to the dream house they began building last spring.

The June 12 move is less than three weeks away, and today she has sorted his things into four piles: one for items she knows she is keeping; one for the church tag sale; another for items she is giving to friends; and another for items that she wants to give away, but cannot bear to. There is a throwaway pile too, but it is insubstantial, although she says she has managed to get rid of "tons" of things. John's books are among the more difficult to part with, because she knows that he would be unhappy to see any go. So even books written in German, like Hagar the Horrible, or the yellowed, how-to martial arts books, make their way into the pile for the church, not the landfill. About 50 boxes of books will go to the new house.

Friends have offered to help, but Pam knows they cannot make these personal decisions for her. So they call her on the phone as she stands alone in the basement of her Darien home today. She has finally managed to part with most of John's clothes, even the prized Patagonia vest she held onto because she could not imagine seeing someone but John wear it. "It was fine," she says today about giving away the clothes. "It's just stuff. Just stuff." Still, she has made sure that this stuff went into appreciative hands, like John's brother, Timothy Works, best friend Kevin Downey and several others.

Sometimes, though, she finds herself letting go too soon. She recently offered John's leather jacket - which she had been thinking about having altered to fit her - to his friend Nick Wilson. "Nick is really the only person that I would want to wear this jacket; don't ask me why, I'm not sure," she says. But as Nick slips his arms into the jacket, both Pam and Nick feel awkward. Nick is noticeably relieved that the jacket is too big for him. Getting it back, Pam, too, is relieved to be holding it again.

She is having a quilt made of John's many cool ties, and plans to hang it in the new house. In the basement are three boxes of books awaiting shipment to John's friends. Among them are "The Handbook of Fixed Income Securities," "African History of Maps," "Battle Maps of the Civil War" and "Serbs and Croats: The Struggle in Yugoslavia."

John had less heady books, such as the complete collection of Star Trek novels, but it was his intelligence that made him such a good strategist on the corporate bond desk at J.P. Morgan, says Owain Morgan, one of the traders who relied on John's advice. Owain knew that some would say John's intellect sometimes clouded his gut instincts, but Morgan missed his friend's valuable insights when John left the renamed J.P. Morgan & Chase in April 2001 to trade stocks at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. The position took him back to the World Trade Center, and John was "over the moon" because, instead of feeding ammunition to traders, he had his hand on the trigger trading stocks. It was with this bullish optimism that John and Pam designed their new home in Norwalk's Rowayton village.

Pam and John had spent most of their married life on New York's Upper East Side, but since Allison was born in July 1998, they had been hearing the parental call that beckons many couples from Manhattan to its stylish suburbs. Edwin Works had been planning for several years to sell them the house that he and his late wife, Barbara, moved to in January 1964. It was just two lots away from Long Island Sound, and a sandy beach, and they, too, had thought it a good place to raise a family. By late October of that year, John Bentley Works was born. They put him in the second-floor room with the best view of the Sound.

John's father understood Pam and John's decision to tear down the weary old house after he sold it to them in early 2001. Still, he stayed away on that March day when the demolition workers arrived. Once they stripped off the home's façade, it looked like a dollhouse before the massive claws of machinery began devouring it. Kevin and Laura Downey had spent many summer days there, and they stopped by to watch with their friends. "I mean I felt kind of sad," Pam recalls. "I mean he [John] did too. It makes you kind of realize how impermanent things are."

  

The plans for the new house called for the master bedroom to be in the same area of the house where John's boyhood bedroom had been. His library would be on the third floor. Off the library would be a deck, which John called a widow's walk, and he insisted on building it to complement the house's nautical theme.

"Yup, this is where it is all going to happen," John told Kevin on an evening last summer as they stood on the widow's walk, then a skeletal lumber frame. There, they had a sweeping view of the Sound and the lighthouse, which the outside decorative posts framing John's new home would mimic in style. "You should put a wet bar up here," Kevin told John.

When Owain Morgan saw the house under construction for the first time at John's memorial service last September, he understood why his friend would be drawn there. He also realized why John was drawn to Pam. "What a perfect fit," he thought, meeting her for the first time. Pam, Owain saw, was no shrinking violet. She could compete with John's wit, pull him down a rung or two when necessary, and keep the jokes flowing should John take himself too seriously.

Pam does not know if it is the Paxil that a psychiatrist has prescribed to relieve her anxiety, or the passage of time that is helping her get through this heart-wrenching chore of sorting through John's belongings today. "Sometimes I feel a million miles away from him," she acknowledges. At first, Pam was hesitant to take Paxil. She feared that her sorrow would build up, and then, after she stopped taking the medication, break like a dam and flood her with grief The psychiatrist assured her that would not happen. Pam still gets "extraordinarily cranky," but the medication has eliminated the overwhelming agitation that made her feel as though she were going to jump out of her skin. The support group for World Trade Center widows that Pam joined last November is taking a summer break, but they will gather in August to bolster each other through the dreaded Sept. 11 anniversary.

Pam is confident that she will receive John's remains once the DNA testing is completed, even though the recovery work at Ground Zero is ending this week. A closing ceremony is planned there for two days from now, but she has no plans to attend. "I mean what is this, the Olympics, the opening and closing ceremonies? Come on," she says looking up from a box she is taping. "I don't know. Who am I to say what is helpful and not helpful for certain people. For me: Not at all helpful? Somewhat helpful? Marginally helpful? Not at all helpful."

She managed to watch the last 20 minutes of an HBO Sept. 11 special two days earlier, but luckily, by tuning in late, she missed the more graphic parts, such as video footage of bodies falling from the buildings. Watching it with the Downeys touched her sadness, which sits persistently waiting for her whenever she sinks even slightly under the surface. "I mean, it is depressing," she said. "How sad do you need to be all the time?"

It is John's trench coat that keeps getting in Pam's way, and seems most reflective of her challenge in the basement today. The coat seems to fit no one, and now, eight months without a wearer, it is starting to look rumpled and passé, like a hand-me-down. Still, she prizes it enough to keep it on a wooden hanger, and is careful not to let it touch the basement floor as she moves it aside so she can reach the boxes that will head off to her new house. On a shelf behind her is a neon light in the shape of cactus that John gave her. She kept it in the window of her city apartment and her friends knew if it was lit, they were welcome. If not, they should stay away.

She has talked lately of learning to sail John's 25-foot sailboat. "Yeah, I am going to keep the boat, I am going to fix the boat, and I am going to learn to captain the boat," she says matter-of-factly while driving to pick up Allison at nursery school in early May. Yet now, two weeks later, as she encounters John's nautical devices, they are foreign to her. "I don't even know what this is," she says, picking up a wooden box. "What is this?" She opens the lid. "A hand-bearing compass? What am I going to do with this? I don't even know if it works." It looks substantial and expensive, and she keeps it. Like the clothes she has finally managed to give away, some dreams she has let go of. Others, like being a captain, remain, like the trench coat.

  

Pam cannot help but wonder if John would object to her move into the new house. "The fact is these are things we never discussed. Maybe he would be mad at me that I should be more practical and think of the future and not move into a house so big," she says of her 3,700-square-foot home. There are many decisions she must make in the basement today, as she does every day, in which she does not have the luxury of consulting her husband.

A painting of a ship at sea leans against one of the basement's paneled walls. John liked the painting, and salvaged it from the old house in Rowayton. But Pam does not like it. She feels uncomfortable throwing it away or giving it to the church rummage sale. She cannot envision hanging it in her new home. Finally, she decides to give it to John's brother next time he is in town from Colorado.

Pam has become the keeper of the legacies of the generations before John, and in these weeks before the move, with so many boxes to sort through, the responsibility seems overwhelming. She opens cartons that include his late mother's yearbook, old LP records and newspaper stories, such as one about man's first walk on the moon. There are other boxes that she decides to move unopened: dishes, glassware and other items from the Rowayton house.

Allison, now nearly 4, is always on her mind as she sorts. Which books will Allison want to read? Which can become references for 12-year-olds, when her daughter starts researching school projects? The books and articles she has been saving about Sept. 11 will help Pam gradually open her daughter's eyes to "that accident" that killed her daddy. Pam also realizes that by then, Allison may not remember John. Allison talks about her father often, and Pam encourages these conversations, such as when Allison recalls a place where she and her daddy used to go. Yet what will happen as the youngster moves on? "It's kind of like asking the rhetorical question: How can you miss something that you never had?"

Allison, as she becomes a young woman, will need reminders to help her understand the kind of person her father was, the kind of reminders found in yearbooks stored in boxes, and newspaper clippings stacked in piles.

John religiously saved the Wall Street Journal on the last day of every year and the first day of the next, and Pam seems both delighted and somber when she finds the pile of newspapers that remind her of the idiosyncrasies in her husband that she found so attractive despite the clutter they produced. Flipping through the Journals, she finds copies of the New York Times folded open to its inside pages. "I guess I will keep these," she says. One announces the engagement, in New York Times parlance, of "Miss Block, 26 years old" when she was the advertising director for the Charles J. Greenthal Group, a real estate group. John, at 24, was an associate vice president at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods - his first tour with the company. The other story, dated Oct. 8, 1989, announces their wedding. "Pamela A. Block is wed to John Bentley Works." She keeps the announcements, but bundles most of the Wall Street Journals for recycling.

For what seems like a long time, Pam sorts through more boxes with little comment, but when she reaches the board games, she is reminded of their honeymoon in Mexico, when they stayed at the beach featured in the movie "10." With no television to watch or radio to listen to, they played gin rummy nearly every night.

It is hard to discard the remains of a dead husband.

  

When Pam and John Works rented this house in Darien in May 2001, it was meant to be a way station between their city apartment and their new house, but it has become Pam's uneasy way station between married life and widowhood.

In this living room, she stood watching the TV news, relaying messages to her husband when he called from the 89th floor of the World Trade Center's South Tower minutes after a hijacked jet screamed into the tower next door. It is to this basement where she retreated to fold laundry robotically after the two buildings fell into a heap. And it is in the upstairs master bedroom where she broke down for the first time, her friend, Laura Downey, grasping for answers to comfort her.

Then, finishing the new house seemed unthinkable, but now she can hardly wait to get out of the rented one.

"I wish someone would buy this house and demolish it, because every time I pass by this house, this will be the house of bad news," she says.

Pam's decision, to continue constructing a house built on a dream that is gone, has been characterized as courageous, a distraction from grief, a monument to her dead husband, a project of healing. Perhaps it is all of these, but to Pam, the home built on the site of her husband's boyhood home is the gateway into the future for her and her daughter, Allison, not a trapdoor into the past.

She cannot escape the reminders that others are in a different place, as when she inevitably compares her mourning process with those of other World Trade Center widows. There was the e-mail recently sent to her by a Sept. 11 activist group. In essence, the e-mail says, "For many of us, it is still Sept. 11 and we are wives waiting for our husbands to come home." The message disturbs her, not only because she does not want to stay stuck in that moment that can suck her up like quicksand, but because she fears that by trying to move on, she appears less caring than these group members.

Why would she want to go there? She is moving into a neighborhood that is entrenched with memories of her married life, as well as John's legacy, but they are easier to remember than the acidic ones that seem to have seeped into the very foundation of the Darien house.

"You know what, like it or not, Allison and I are starting our lives here," she says. "It's going to be our home, and it's a darn nice home. How could you not be excited to live here? It's everything that I wanted it to be."

The evening before Pam's scheduled move, she calls me on my cell phone. Tomorrow marks the start of her new life, and she seems bent on making a clean break. She wants to halt this project in which I am chronicling the worst year of her life, she tells me. She is growing weary of being labeled a World Trade Center widow and fears that the continued publicity, including a book I am writing about her life, will keep her forever stuck in that role. On the day in the basement two weeks earlier, she had already recalled a story about how she is starting to feel like a freak at times.

She was picking up a pizza with Kevin's daughter, Sarah. The teenager was babysitting Allison so Pam could go out with her friend, Kim Statkevicus, whose husband Derek was also killed in the South Tower. Sarah and Pam passed a neighbor who was sitting at an outdoor table with several others. "I didn't really see them when I was walking in, or walking out, but as I got into the car, I saw them, and I stuck my hand out the sunroof and I waved," Pam explains. "And with this, I can see this neighbor leaning over to the rest of the people at the table, and saying, I'm sure: `That woman lost her husband at the trade center,' because all of a sudden the person who was furthest back, I can see her, she was craning to get a look at me, and you know, I looked at Sarah, ...and I said, `See, they're talking about me.' "

Pam is laughing nervously now.

"You know?" she adds, her voice sounding tortured and tight.

"Am I forever going to be the Trade Center widow? Well, it's like I'm not a mutant, for crying out loud," she says. "Sometimes, you feel like a circus sideshow. I can do other things besides be a World Trade Center widow. I'm still a mother, I'm still a person."

We talk on the phone for more than 90 minutes, and it is not an easy conversation. Neither of us has ever faced anything like this before, and we are stunned by its intimacy. Objectivity is a pillar of journalism, but no journalist has ever written well about things she does not care about. I can tell how vulnerable she feels, exposing her raw feelings to strangers. I try to shore up any loose pilings in the solid foundation of trust we have built, but I know that if she asks me to, I will walk away. I do not want to be a barrier to the recovery I am chronicling.

In the end, with little explanation, Pam decides to continue.

I feel fragile as I arrive at her home the next day.

  

It is moving day, and Pam looks good even though she has been complaining about gaining weight since John died. Robert Dorsett, a college friend and her interior decorator, is here. He flew in from Houston to provide moral support, and the two stayed up last night, catching up and sipping wine until after 1 a.m. With frequent visitors and calls from friends for dinner, Pam has been busier than ever in the past few months, sometimes too busy. She is happy that her friends have not tired of her.

Rob kidded her for ironing her cropped jeans and red-and-white-striped long-sleeved shirt this morning, but she told him, "I know I will feel better if I am fresh and pressed."

Last night, in our phone conversation, she talked about today. "Have I addressed how I will feel about John tomorrow? No. I don't know how I am going to feel. All I can tell you is ... I am going to christen that house tomorrow, and I will probably be sad that John is not there. But I am still excited."

With 389 boxes and several rooms of furniture, the movers are sweating by mid-morning in the stifling humidity of this June day. Elba, the housekeeper, has taken Allison to "la playa," the beach, a short walk from the youngster's new home. Allison has shown little enthusiasm for the new house, and sometimes does not want to go in when we visit, but today, she is excited about going to the beach. She has started her own new beginning. Two weeks ago, she decided to give up her "Baby Da," her pacifier. Later today, Pam will hold her daughter long and hard when Allison breaks into tears after finding a pacifier behind a television that the movers had carried out.

Emptying out, the house begins to show its faults. The low ceilings make it feel claustrophobic, and the leafy trees outside darken the rooms even on the brightest days. Pam's dresser never fit in the small bedroom upstairs, and she has been trekking downstairs to get her clothes from her dresser, which has spent the past 13 months in the dining room.

Rob goes on a reconnaissance mission to the new house before Pam heads there in the early afternoon. He returns with bad news. The workers are still cleaning up, and Rob - who is accustomed to seeing his clients move into unfinished houses - is surprised at the amount of work that remains to be done. "I wouldn't move in," he confides. Pam could have negotiated another month in Darien, but she wants to save another month's rent, and is determined to get out of this house of bad news.

Her new house, with its high ceilings and long windows, is a bright, cheerful place. Open and airy, there are no walls separating the family room, living room, kitchen and dining room; just tree-sized wooden posts. Each closet has a line of square holes across the top, reminiscent of portholes, and the closet doors are raised off the floor, like those in a ship's cabin. Upstairs, the smooth, cloudy green tiles on the walls of the master bathroom shower resemble sea glass. Pam mostly stuck to the original plan, even though the spacious shower is built for two and the master bathroom has two sinks. She hopes to spend years here, and early on she had asked her brother-in-law if he would mind her dating again. She did not want him to be upset if she remarried someday, and lived at the site of his boyhood home.

But there have been no dates, and today she arrives at a house with a front yard that is still dirt. The moving truck nearly topples the blue port-o-let in front as it backs in. Inside, industrial vacuums scream, a worker washes the windows, another climbs a ladder to the roof and a shirtless man sits in the master bathroom working on the tile. The kitchen sink has yet to be installed, the kitchen floor is still plywood, and there is no stove. On the shiny shelf of the kitchen island sits a vase with a dozen white roses. They are from the architect, and Pam smiles when she reads the card. Another neighbor has dropped off a gift bag with cocktail stirrers inside. Pam walks over to Karl Nelson, the contractor, who is looking exhausted and sweaty. She hugs him. He looks moved, and Pam is smiling.

Kevin Downey has stopped by and is heading for the refrigerator to grab a Corona Light. He can't find a bottle opener, and he tries to snap off the cap with a pink Bic lighter. "John could do this," Kevin says. Kevin cannot. Kevin would rather be at work if he could find a job to replace the one he lost two months before John died. Last week an offer came through, and the Downeys spent the weekend thinking they had finally pulled out of the rough. But on Monday, the company called to withdraw the offer. The caller gave no explanation or apology. There is apparently no need for professional courtesy in this job-short, post-Sept. 11 economy.

Outside, he walks to the seawall at the beach near Pam's house to point out the pilings in the cove, remnants of a ferry dock. As kids, he explains, he and John would swim to them at high tide. As adults they had talked about doing it again, but time and water has further eroded the pilings. They stick out of the water like daggers, and it seemed too dangerous to try. "I miss my friend. I miss my friend a lot," Kevin says. "Summer's here and for him not to be around ... May has come and gone and the boat didn't get painted," he says. "There are little milestones that you hit in the course of a year you pass." Without his friend here today Kevin seems a bit lost. "I'm just kind of here. I would be going out on a limb if I said that I was helping." Behind him a miniature American flag that has been placed among flowers in a planter limps in the wind, and its colors are faded.

The move, like most, takes longer than anyone anticipates. It takes time to turn a house into a home, but the familiar furniture and friends aid the transformation. The tan-and-black dining room chairs that looked so pedestrian crowded into the Darien dining room look stylish and regal in the new house, placed around a dining room table accented by recessed lighting. Upstairs, Laura Downey is making Allison's bed, which once belonged to John's grandmother. The pieces of Pam's bed await assembly in the master bedroom on an Oriental rug that belonged to Pam's grandfather, who passed it on to Pam's mother, who gave it to Pam. Downstairs, Rob loads food into the refrigerator.

On the kitchen island, there are goat cheese and crackers from Laura; a bean and jalapeño cheese dip from Marina MacPhee, a friend and neighbor; and lemon chicken from Laurie Scarito Itkowitz, a longtime friend and Pam's old roommate in the city. Ten pairs of shoes that visitors have taken off in respect for the freshly sanded bamboo floor sit on the cardboard walkway that the movers have laid down. Under the watchful eye of 13-year-old Sarah Downey, Allison is keeping busy with Ellie MacPhee, who is 6, and Laurie's daughter Lauren, who is 5. Will Downey, 9, has teamed up with Marina's son Jonathan, 11, and they are setting out to skateboard in the street, now dotted with rain puddles.

Among the adults, there is little talk about John and what could have been. They joke with Pam about her new start, i.e. going outside to smoke cigarettes instead of smoking in her fresh house. Pam obliges them when they shoo her out the door, and everyone laughs as she lowers her head like a misbehaving puppy during her exit. She has traded in her pressed blouse, now rain-soaked, for an oversized pink men's Gap shirt that she wore when she was pregnant with Allison.

Kevin gets a laugh with his comment, "If John were alive, this wouldn't have happened." He is referring to his search with Marina's husband, David MacPhee, through the boxes stacked in the kitchen. They cannot find the box that holds the Ketel One vodka.

Yet it is easy to imagine a heartier laugh from Kevin, or more joy in Laura's voice, when she stands in the kitchen where the stove will be, calling to Pam. "I'm liking this. We're cooking. Chef and sous-chef." Her friend Laurie reminds Pam again today that her move marks a new beginning. "It's a new chapter, a happily-ever-after like the story goes."

At 10 p.m., the movers are still unloading the truck. Some of the guests are leaving, and a weary Pam is losing her enthusiasm for a champagne christening tonight.

Earlier, she quietly carried out a more somber ritual.

The flag she had received last October after the ceremony held for families at Ground Zero is among the final items she removed from the Darien house. Sarah Downey carried it out for her. When Pam arrives at the new house, she carries the folded flag up the open stairway to the third floor library. Built into the rafters of the library's grand conical ceiling is a champagne cork from the bottle that Pam cracked open with Kevin and Laura on the widow's walk last October to mark what would have been John's 37th birthday. Pam had considered flying the flag on the pole installed outside on the widow's walk, but she decided it would be improper to fly a ceremonial flag. Also, this is John's flag, the one she held onto so tightly all the way back to the car after receiving it last fall. This evening, she holds it again, and surveys the library's white shelves. They are stark and empty. She picks one, but quickly chooses another. Placing the flag on the shelf she has chosen, Pam steps back. The glow from the low-voltage lamp above it hits the flag at a warm angle and, folded in the wood-and-glass case that her mother gave Pam, the flag takes on the splendor and permanence of a museum piece. The shelf is high enough to look out to the Sound.

Kevin walks over to Pam and says, "I don't want to be morose, but I can't believe this is happening." Kevin and Laura were with Pam when she received the flag, and they stand with her today.

When Pam walks back downstairs, Sarah and Allison stay in the library.

The sky is darkening outside the windows facing the Sound and the June air is oppressive and steamy. The wind is blowing up the light undersides of the leaves on the trees and the seagulls are catching a ride on the air lofts. Whitecaps ripple through the cove where a lighthouse horn mourns the overcast skies. A storm is brewing, and out in the distance, a sailboat cuts through the fog.

Safe inside, under the watch of Sarah and her father's flag, Allison, a month before her fourth birthday, is marching and dancing through this library, swinging her arms in the air. She is singing a song:

"This is my new house! My new house! It's a part of everything that you've been waiting for."

Deborah Petersen Swift is on leave from The Courant while she writes a book based on this series about Pam Works and the year following the death of her husband.